Business Climate Indicator In Manufacturing, Medium- And High-Tech Industries In Russia

The paper presents the Business Climate Indicator (BCI) in the Russian manufacturing including the medium and high-tech (MHT) manufacturing industries. The authors explain the feasibility of a new alternative measure that summarizes common information of business tendency surveys cleared up of specific fluctuations in individual variables, and give arguments to prove its effectiveness. The resulting BCI reflects the quantitative changes in manufacturing growth more accurately and with a lead compared to the traditional confidence indicator. Identification of the BCI cyclic profile and its visualization through a tracer demonstrate all significant waves of manufacturers’ optimism and pessimism for the period from January 2005 to January 2019. To construct BCI-MHT, the units of observation and the input information are divided into three groups according to the technological level of industries. The dynamics of BCI-MHT is close to those of BCI; however, during the protracted recession in 2016-2018, the sentiments of manufacturers of medium- and high-tech products were less pessimistic compared with the sentiments of all manufacturers.